Clouds and CDN's

As long time CDN followers we're fascinated by the question of how to get the best performance out of Cloud applications. This certainly includes incorporating traditional CDN capabilities (such as edge caching) but the more interesting question to us is what a higher level platform (Azure for example) can do to achieve the performance without requiring the programmer to understand the issues or CDN's. We know the Azure team is thinking about this (MS has built out an internal CDN for many separate reasons) but so far they haven't given many details. At Structure 09, CDN's were often discussed, but in a somewhat confusing way. Paul Sagan, President and CEO of Akamai, gave one of the more coherent business presentations focusing on the high level benefits of Cloud computing (e.g., energy efficiency) and then the role CDN's must play making Cloud applications high performance.  Many of the big Cloud guys talked about CDN's too, but what they said was that CDN's had become commodity technology, and although they all believed in the value of edge caching (and internal caching for that matter) most just rolled their own and/or happily played the leading vendors off against each other. We think that the question becomes simpler and clearer if one views "private Clouds" as what people are doing with virtualization in private, consolidated data centers. For these many customers rolling your own CDN isn't an option, and we think that these utility data centers will be more important than public clouds (economically) for a long time to come.